Sometimes the most engaging puzzle a thriller has to offer is deducing the calculations that went into creating it—what a colleague of mine used to refer to as the “plot math.” Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel The Woman in Cabin 10—now adapted as a film for Netflix by Simon Stone (The Dig)—became a bestseller by combining a classic Agatha Christie–style manor-house mystery with the mid-2010s trend of unreliable female narrators spawned by Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train.
As a variation on the isolated country house, setting The Woman in Cabin 10 on a cruise ship at sea sounds ingenious—if you’ve forgotten that Christie already did it in Death on the Nile. Making the trip a small luxury cruise keeps the cast of suspects few and glamorous. But in the mid-2010s, all the rage was for thrillers told from the perspective of an average, relatable woman under duress, usually recovering from some trauma and self-medicating with too much booze. Like the narrators of The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, Ware’s Laura “Lo” Blacklock believes she has witnessed a murder, but everyone writes her off as a hysterical female under the influence of too much champagne. Since the average woman doesn’t typically go on an opulent ship like the Aurora Borealis with rich people she doesn’t really know, Ware had to figure out how to get Lo on a posh stateroom balcony on the other side of a privacy screen from a terrible crime. Her solution was to make Lo a journalist covering the ship’s maiden voyage, courtesy of the vessel’s billionaire owner.
Add Keira Knightley as the star of your film adaptation, however, and you’ve got even more algebra to do. In Ware’s novel, Lo is a junior staffer at a travel magazine, filling in after her boss and mentor can’t make the trip. Still deeply rattled by a home-invasion burglary that has exacerbated what appears to be an anxiety disorder, Lo is awkward and easily spooked by the most mundane interactions but also desperate to advance her career. Reading Ware’s novel, I was startled to learn that the character is supposed to be 32. She comes across more like a 25-year-old on her first real job, and also way too timorous and introverted for her chosen field.
Confidence, however, is pretty central to the Knightley brand, plus she has nearly a decade on Ware’s heroine, so the Netflix adaptation has had to make significant recalibrations to her character. Instead of a gawky novice, Knightley’s Lo is a valiant star journalist. “Your Guardian exposé on those brave Kurdish women really stuck with me,” the billionaire’s wife tells her. The trauma this Lo is recovering from is the murder of one of her sources—drowned, specifically and significantly—for talking to her. Instead of, as in the book, getting her first big assignment as a glossy magazine journalist writing about a new cruise line, she’s supposed to be taking a “break” by agreeing to write a puff piece about a bunch of one-percenters taking a boat trip for charity. Never mind that in the real world, a journalist like Lo would consider such a piece far beneath her: No editor would ever send her to do it. It’s actually much harder to wring a publishable story out of the orchestrated performances of self-congratulatory rich people than out of the struggles of brave Kurdish women. Couldn’t Lo just … take a vacation?
Key to the appeal of this improbable premise is that it provides the opportunity to judge the rich while ogling their goodies. The movie fully exploits this, lingering over the ship’s swank accoutrements and scenes of the extensive staff carefully plating the passengers’ dinner against a soundtrack of lavish strings. That’s the dinner where Lo has a bit too much to drink, only to wake up later in the night to sounds of a struggle, a mighty splash, and a bloody handprint on that privacy screen between her balcony and the balcony of the cabin next door, Cabin 10. But when she alerts security, they insist that all passengers and crew are accounted for, and that Cabin 10 was never occupied. Lo—who earlier that day, in an attempt to avoid an ex-boyfriend also covering the cruise, ducked through the door of Cabin 10 and encountered a young woman there—insists otherwise.
Everyone on the ship treats Lo with an infuriating concern, assuming that she dreamed the splash as a symptom of PTSD following the death of her source. Central to the Girl on the Train–style thriller is this sense of persecution and wholesale gaslighting. The bloody handprint vanishes, as do other small physical clues that would prove the missing woman’s existence, all of which convinces Lo that there’s a conspiracy and convinces everyone else that she’s losing it. In 2016 this premise registered as highly gendered: Women try to tell the truth about violence and no one believes them. Their understandable response to trauma gets written off as mere craziness, and Lo’s determination to investigate what happened to the woman in Cabin 10 gets interpreted as a kind of breakdown. Even Lo herself—who is prone to panic attacks and freezes at the sight of a cook in latex gloves like the ones worn by the man who broke into her apartment—sometimes wonders if this could be true.
Stone has shrewdly reconfigured Ware’s story to keep up with the times by focusing on class instead of gender. The other passengers are a fun collection of obnoxious wealthy types: a dissolute old rock star (Paul Kaye), a hippieish tech entrepreneur (Christopher Rygh), an “alpha male” CEO (Daniel Ings) with a vapid influencer date (Kaya Scodelario), a catty art dealer (the ever-splendid Hannah Waddingham), and the yacht’s ostentatiously pious owner (Guy Pearce), who is launching a foundation in honor of his dying wife (Lisa Loven Kongsli). Like most rich people, they have numerous customs whose unfamiliarity to Lo underlines her outsider status.
In the film, Lo makes a few faux pas, mostly by under- or overdressing, but trying to pass Knightley off as back-footed and self-doubting is a losing game, and Stone doesn’t play it for long. The novel’s suggestions that Lo has a habit of drinking too much have been purged. Instead, in the movie’s most effective moments, she’s arrayed against the obdurate narcissism of the very wealthy. They disbelieve her not because she’s a woman. They disbelieve her because she’s not one of them, however much they profess to admire her work. When she tries to question the crew members, they perceive her as just another problem guest making trouble for them. Even the initially fetishized aspects of the cruise, like the twice-daily room cleanings, become sinister as the few shreds of physical evidence Lo is able to find get tossed out and washed away by the serenely competent staff.
The film does retain some of the novel’s cheesier touches, like a warning to Lo written on a steamed-up mirror, and for all that the story has been changed, Knightley is still miscast. A less self-assured actor could have made Lo a more interesting character, a woman at least a little attracted to the comforts she doesn’t possess instead of a righteous crusader. But Stone’s application of high-Hitchcockian gloss to this revamped tale of class paranoia works impressively well. All that’s beautiful and exciting and enviable about the Aurora Borealis turns out to be a trap designed to grind up everyone but the haves. Lately it feels as if we’re all on that boat.
